Several customers of German retailers are discovering that the drives they bought as new actually have tens of thousands of hours on the counter. These are not disks bought directly from Seagate, but some authorized retailers are involved.
Consternation among Seagate customers in Germany: already dozens of hard drive buyers have discovered that their supposedly new drives are actually repackaged used products, with tens of thousands of working hours on the counter.
The ball got rolling last week. A reader of the German Web site Heise.de stated at the time he bought two HDDs from a distributor with minor signs of use on the outside. An initial SMART test looked kosher: the telemetry indicated the drives were unused. However, a more sophisticated FARM(Field Accessible Reliability Metrics) check showed otherwise: the HDDs had 10,000 hours and 15,000 hours behind them, respectively.
The reader returned the disks and bought two new ones from another distributor. He checked those new discs and determined that both had been used 22,000 hours.
Not an isolated problem
Heise published those findings, and received response from 50 readers with a similar experience. The drives in question were all from different retailers. These included authorized sellers and large stores such as Amazon.
The scam seems to have occurred mainly with Exos drives with 16 TB capacity, but smaller drives and used drives from other ranges were also sold as new.
End of warranty
Heise.de was able to run a sample at some drives to check the warranty. Those expired in most cases in 2026. Seagate basically offers a five-year warranty on the Exos drives, implying that they were first sold around 2021. All those affected had bought them in recent weeks.
It is unclear how widespread the suspected fraud is, but there seems to be no coincidence. After all, the used HDDs were sold as new at quite a few different retailers. Moreover, SMART results do not reset themselves: someone must have willfully disguised the HDDs as new.
Not Seagate itself, but bad advertising
It looks like the problems were not caused by Seagate itself. The manufacturer has a limited circuit for selling refurbished drives but sells them as such. Moreover, a warranty check does reflect the actual age. Seagate is said to be investigating the situation and already at least one retailer has temporarily cancelled orders.
Seagate said the following in a statement: ‘Seagate did not sell or distribute these fraudulent hard drives to resellers. We therefore recommend that resellers only purchase hard drives from certified Seagate distribution partners. This way, they can be sure that they are only buying and selling new or Seagate factory-certified drives. Hard drives that have been refurbished and factory recertified by Seagate as part of the Seagate Drive Circularity Programme can be recognised by the white-green label and the indication ‘Factory Recertified’. If consumers suspect they have encountered a fraudulent Seagate drive, they can report it via the Seagate Ethics Helpline’
In any case, the situation is very strange. It essentially affects customers who think they are buying a new drive, although we also question the origin of the Exos drives. After all, those server drives could have contained sensitive information during their previous life, and it is unclear whether it was really completely erased according to the rules of the art.